Before Kristen ever began teaching self-advocacy, she spent many years moving through the world as though she were half a beat out of sync with everyone around her. In professional environments, for around fifteen years, she often felt she was performing a script written for another person. Social expectations flickered around her like unreadable instructions, rules shifting beneath her feet with little-to-no explanation.
“Everything that seemed natural to other people was a mystery to me,” she said. “I felt like an alien, like I’d landed on the wrong planet.”
Long before she knew she was autistic, she carried the silent weight of misunderstanding. She was labeled “difficult” as a child, a word that echoed through her home and classrooms with the cold efficiency of a conveyor belt. Meltdowns weren’t met with compassion; confusion didn’t result in curiosity. Those moments calcified into a belief that the problem - whatever it may be - belonged to her alone. She grew up learning to mask, to shrink, to interpret through guesswork and a lot of grit.
When she became an adult, she lived in a constant tension: sharp intelligence wrapped in self-doubt, capability knotted with the fear of getting something deemed “simple” wrong. She kept a small card in her wallet, a physical reminder that she wasn’t, in her words, “stupid,” even when tasks that appeared effortless to others left her overwhelmed.
A Life Taking Shape
Everything came to a halt at fifty. Her autism diagnosis didn’t rewrite her history, but instead illuminated it. Grief surfaced… for opportunities missed and for support never offered. But alongside it came some astonishing clarity. Suddenly, the threads of her life, tangled for decades on end, aligned into a pattern she could finally interpret.
“With my diagnosis,” she said, “I’m finally able to understand who I am as a person.”
When she found the posting for Easterseals Midwest’s Self-Determination Program, something inside came to a steady. She had no teaching background, no formal training. But she recognized, instinctively, that this was a place where she didn’t need to contort herself into a foreign shape. Easterseals offered what a lot of workplaces don’t: authenticity without penalty, acceptance without caveat.
So she stepped forward with one careful, courageous step into a role that would become a major turning point.
Learning, Living, Leading
Today, Kristen is a Self-Determination Instructor, teaching the same skills she once had to fight by herself. The program empowers adults with developmental disabilities to understand their rights, advocate for themselves, and navigate the world with confidence and agency. She brings a lot of knowledge, but also lived experience. Her students recognize themselves in her stories, her honesty, and her incredible sense of humor. She knows the exact terrain they’re walking because she has walked it for a long time, sometimes crawling, sometimes stumbling. Always moving forward.
The air feels different inside her classroom. Less like a test, more like a gathering place where others can sit in their full humanity without needing to apologize. She teaches self-advocacy not as a concept but as a practice: earnest, imperfect, always ongoing. Through her work, she transforms the challenges that once isolated her into a guiding light paving the way.
Kristen is still learning, still evolving, still claiming her place in a world that once was inhospitable. But now, she does it alongside people who are finding their voices, too. All of it from one breakthrough at a time.
Community Is Built Together
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